Drifting

I am generally a very happy go lucky kind of guy, especially on Fridays. But as my struggle with unemployment drags on like a Wambo girl’s resistance to giving up the cookie, I find myself surrounded by a deathly air of melancholy; all around me. This pensive mood laced with traces of woefulness and sorrow stalks me like vultures circling the skies above, eagerly waiting for their meal to die. It’s not my favourite feeling in the world, waking up feeling like the love child of desolation and gloom is something I hate. I probably hate it more than a vagina hates dry sex, but I have been told that I couldn’t possibly know how that feels like because I don’t have one (a vagina). All I know is that on most days, I can conquer the world; then there are those days where I see no point to my existence in this world. Yet alone the point of even waking up to another day, which is ungrateful because in this world we are all visitors; who conveniently forget that our visa can expire at any given moment.

This thing, let’s call it that for lack of a better word. This thing just hits me, it is not like I can turn it off and on; it doesn’t make appointments and I can’t always handle it. Most times I am alone, so I can listen to Ed Sheeran and wallow in self-pity. Other times I am not alone, which means I have to deal with the frustration of trying to get the message across to whoever is around “I want to be left alone”. Getting rid of people is not always easy, because we all operate on different levels of Intelligence Coefficient (IQ). Sometimes I really can’t hold things together, it drains all mental strength from me to just restrain myself from buckling and letting an anxiety attack consume me. So what do I do? I do what anyone else would do, I drink. Not to forget, not to disappear but just to take the edge off. To get me high enough to counteract the melancholic mood of my thinking, but even that can only really bring me back to neutral. But neutral is a good state of mind to be in, neither negative nor positive; just somewhere in between.

That is how I spend my days, drifting. From a series of highs to an extended low, just drifting like a passenger jet on auto pilot. It is typical of an adjustment syndrome as the mental health professional calls it, like stretching elastic material to the breaches of its elastic limit, it becomes as thin as it can ever be whilst still maintain its elasticity. It dawns on me that this is not exactly where I want to be in life, but this stage of life is not permanent. It will end, I just hope there is something left when it does. What if it consumes everything and all that is left in an empty shell? Now that would really be something sad.